Christian Kracht - Eurotrash (Serpent's Tale, 2024) ****

The cover and the title of the book are somewhat deceptive. Yes, the story takes place in Switzerland, and it relates the story of a middle-aged Swiss man who picks up his mother for a trip around the country. The narrator - called Christian Kracht, so I assume it's somewhat autobiographical - has a hate/love relationship with his mother, not only due to the wealth that his (grand)-parents gathered, partly due to sympathy and collaboration with the Nazi's. He has no qualms about emptying his mother's bank account, and to use it on a spending spree on their road trip. His mother has been in psychatric care for a large part of her older life, and the trip acts as an endeavour to come to terms with his past as well as to reconcile with his mother before she will die. Furthermore, she has a stoma pouch which leads to further complications. 

The story is cynical and funny, primarily because the mother has her own kind of personality: direct, smart and brutal. A woman who no longer cares what people think of her. She drinks what she wants whenever she wants, and self-medicates at her heart's content. In the process of re-builing the mother-son relationship, the story gives a broad cultural picture of our times: novels, politics, economic inequality, the power of the media (his fater worked for Axel Springer of the publishing company with the same name).

The power balance between both characters shifts as the story unfolds. His initiative and relative dominance over his mother gradually shifts, and she takes gradually more control. She is not entirely who he thinks she is, and that is possibly one of the best parts of the book, next to the fact that it is very well written. It's also tightly composed, entertaining as well as relevant. 

 

Christian Kracht - Imperium (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2012) *

"In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nürenberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island of Kabakon. His goal: to establish a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919: he was forty-three years old", is the short description on the back cover of the book. And the man actually existed. He had even a degrees in physics and chemistry from Erlangen University, and he wrote a book "The Carefree Future"in 1898.

In this novel, Kracht reconstructs the life of the excentric man, telling his arrival in New Guinea, the creation of his plantation, his local servants on the island, his interactions with the authorities and other Germans on the main land. Somehow it fails to make the person really come to live. Kracht depicts his main character with a kind of detached superiority, instead of really trying to understand the man's motivations, actions and ensuing insanity. At times it made me think of that other bad novel "The Confederacy Of Dunces", for the simple reason that the main character is stupid, and you wonder the whole time why a novelist would spend time to ridicule his main character. Why?

Kracht's writing is not bad by itself, and sure, no doubt Engelhardt's vision on life and on diet were pretty narrow, one-sided and doomed to fail, and even the author did a lot to bring historical facts back to us, the condescending tone kills what could have been a strong book.